Monday, June 7, 2010

Much ado has been made recently of the triangular plot of land that juts like a shark fin between 7th Avenue South, Perry Street, and Greenwich. The MTA owns the property and recently proposed to build a faux-townhouse there to conceal their planned ventilation plant, a controversial development.

Also known as Mulry Square, the triangle is famous for being the supposed location of the inspiration for Edward Hopper's most well-known painting, Nighthawks.

But was it?

A couple of JVNY readers, blogger Teri Tynes and singer/songwriter Don Everett Pearce, recently contacted me with questions and suggestions about the location of the Hopper diner. With their help, and research of my own, I set off onto a trail of clues, possibilities, and dead ends. I started at Mulry Square.

In Hopper expert Gail Levin's book Hopper's Places and her Hopper biography, she writes that the painter himself claimed that Nighthawks "was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet." Those streets, adds Levin, were "Eleventh Street and Seventh Avenue." She goes on to say that the diner "was surely on the empty triangular lot" in that spot.

Tour guides, news stories, and blogs all refer to the MTA’s lot as the singular birthplace of Nighthawks. It is accepted Village folklore. But there is ample evidence to the contrary. Nighthawks Forever points to a cities data file that has no record of a diner ever being on the spot. And the New York Public Library’s digital archives supplies the photo evidence.

In a shot from 1933, a Kesbec Esso gas station stands in that location. There is no diner.

The gas station turns up in photos as late as 1940. Nighthawks is dated 1942. So perhaps the gas station was demolished and replaced with a diner in 1941. The city's taxmen photographed the corner again in 1980. In that photo, there is still no diner and no remnants of it, though the Esso station buildings were still standing there, graffitied and abandoned beneath a painted advertisement for London’s Hard Rock Cafe.

The supposed diner tiles that reporters from Wikipedia to The Villager say you can see in the MTA’s lot most likely belonged to the gas station. In fact, there's a scruffy white-brick chunk that looks like the old Esso still standing there today.

From the evidence, we can only conclude that the empty lot at Mulry Square is not the birthplace of Nighthawks.

22 comments:

Jack Womack
said...

Jeremiah,

In NY THEN AND NOW (Dover, still in print I think...) on p.105 there is a photo of the intersection looking south, in 1975 -- there at the corner is the Exxon station as well as a small building next to the gas station, on Greenwich, which is I believe a White Tower restaurant -- very clear in the 1975 pic -- and it looks to me that the 1933 photo shows the predecessor gas station (small, like the one further down the avenue that's now a private residence) seeming to abut the White Tower (or Castle, or whatever it was...) This isn't so clear in the earlier shot but you can see the older restaurant in the Dover book.

That stretch of Seventh Avenue was only cut through in 1913-18, according to the Dover book(the facing photo is one of those that just leaves you blinking...) so there wouldn't have been much of a chance for anything to have been built between then and 1933.

In the early 60s I used to stop in at the White Castle directly across the avenue from the Sheridan movie house on 11th and 7th. Never knew it was the location of Nighthawks but I was just a teen then, what did I know?

Speaking of tiles on that site, the spontaneous 9/11 memorial that spring up there thanks to the (now gone) ceramics shop Our Name Is Mud has always been one of the most beautiful and poignant I have ever seen. I'll never forget that one tile that hung there. It was simply painted blue and written in black lettering said "The Sky Was So Blue . . ." I assume it referred to the fact that it was an otherwise beautiful late-summer morning in New York that day.

I notice many of the tiles are gone. Does anyone know where they went? I thought I may have read thats some of them were taken for a more formal memorial elsewhere. Does anyone know?

Has anything ruled out the corner of 10th Street and Greenwich, with the diner situated where (the now burned-out) Village Paper is now? When I heard it was a Greenwich Avenue location, I'd always assumed it was there (with some serious painterly modifications by Hopper).

Village Paper is a good guess, but it was not a diner in 1942. same goes for the Florist. there are so many possible locations--many of which will be covered in the next post. that area is loaded with triangular corners.

After seeing the Whitney's show on Oscar Bluemner a few years ago, I thought that perhaps Hopper's Nighthawks was inspired by Bluemner's "Roosevelt Laundry" from 1934. Both were in similar art circles (Steiglitz, etc.) and so Hopper could very well have seen the Bluemner painting. There are a lot of similarities in the composition and even colors. For Bluemner's image: http://www.hmsg.si.edu/visit/collection_object.asp?key=32&subkey=4142

As far as I know, the background is in Nyack, NY where Hopper grew up. If you use street-view on Google, you can see the windows on the second floor of the San Juan Cafe building at 22 North Broadway. The doorway is blocked now, but it has the same layout as the painting. Not sure if that fits into the conversation...

Ever since reading about your research into Nighthawks, I began looking myself [I've lived in the area for the last 36 years and Hopper is one of my favorite artists].I took a photo of the corner of W. 13th St. & Greenwich Ave which just might fit.I would send it to you, if you gave me permission and an email address.

hi Hal, do you mean the former home of Cafe de Bruxelles? i know that corner, and it's certainly a possibility, which i did not investigate. someone needs to make a trip to the Municipal Archives and take a look.

I suggest the corner and diner Hopper was referring to is at Greenwich avenue and 13th street across from Jackson Square. Currently Lyon, but previously Bruxxella. The restaurant has a similar shape to the one in Nighthawks.